Fascinating post on musicmachinery.com a couple days ago about Time Magazine's online Annual "100 Most Influential People" poll getting hacked by Anonymous. Time Magazine allowed users to vote on its website for the person they considered most influential in 2008, using a simple form. Anonymous seized the opportunity to skew the results by spelling out a message with the first initials of the top 21 entries:

Anonymous used an army of bots to overload Time's legitimate votes, and in an effort to stem the attack, Time first took the form offline, where it continued to be exploited, and then finally put reCaptcha, a popular anti-spam visual-text-matching system, on the form (SearchPartner.Pro uses reCaptcha on our contact us form). reCaptcha is quite effective at defeating known exploits that attempt to use OCR (optical character recognition) to read the image and translate it to text, so Anonymous resorted to a "brute force" attack using members (humans) to place as many votes as possible.

Anonymous also revealed many sophisticated techniques for defeating reCaptcha's pattern logic so that humans could submit entries faster. In the end, Time was unable to stop the hack and you can see the results in the image above. Time did not deny that it had been hacked and downplayed the importance of the results.

The news provoked a strong debate on the reCaptcha newsgroup. Was reCaptcha hacked? Typically, hacking a CAPTCHA would mean using a computer to defeat the protection, so that a human would not have to interact with the form. No one really knows if there is an OCR system that can do this right now, although hackers are constantly evolving this technology. Using brute force to defeat the system with human interaction is also quite common, and there are many teams of hackers in China, India and Russia (and elsewhere) that advertise these services, but this isn't so much of a hack as overwhelming a single point of protection.

The lesson learned here is that relying on a single technology for protection will inevitably fail, while adding additional steps can slow down brute force attacks by many orders of magnitude, for example by restricting the number of submissions by IP address, embedding hidden text fields on forms (that only a bot would see and try to add data to), adding two-factor verification (e.g. CAPTCHA and random problem match), etc.